Posted
by
Soulskill
on Thursday June 17, 2010 @11:08AM
from the clean-up-your-acta dept.

judgecorp writes "Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman has said in a blog post that the ACTA file-sharing proposals punish users unfairly. He wrote, 'Any time there is a proposal to change things for the worse, the obvious way to oppose it is to campaign for the status quo. To campaign for the status quo suggests the approach of singing its praises; thus, praising WIPO is a natural way to highlight how ACTA is a step for the worse. However, where there have been previous changes for the worse, lauding the status quo tends to legitimize them. The past 20 years have seen global waves of harmful changes in copyright law — some promoted by WIPO. To confront a further assault by presenting the status quo as ideal means we stop fighting to reverse them. It means that our adversaries need only propose a further affront to our rights to gain our acceptance of their last affront. Instead of making the status quo our ideal, we should demand positive changes to recover freedoms already lost.' The FSF has launched a petition against the ACTA proposals."

That's just the first step! Once they get enough signatures, they'll print signs and hold protests on campuses all over Boston. From then, if ACTA isn't dropped, a e-mail campaign will be started to get people to forward e-mails to all of their friends!

Stallman might make accurate predictions (though I wouldn't say that all his predictions are all that accurate - it's just that you don't hear much about those which are not), but his suggestions as to how things should be done instead are utopian, to put it politely.